Cisco Cisco Nexus 2224TP GE Fabric Extender Information Guide

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Challenge

Rotterdam, the second-largest city in the Netherlands, is also notable as the largest

port in Europe, with an annual shipping throughput of 430 million tons. Such an

important trading gateway poses formidable challenges for the Government of

Rotterdam. Not only does it have to deliver the services expected by more than

617,000 citizens, but also it needs to support a great number of port-related

functions without which the city’s lifeblood would cease to flow. For Rotterdam

Services ICT Institute, the organization tasked with providing the technology

underpinning those services, this meant a growing number of IT applications.
Alfons Carlebur, senior project adviser with the Rotterdam Services ICT Institute,

says: “Five years ago we had around 500 different IT applications, but this has

now increased to over 2000. Our data center was increasingly unable to support

those requirements, of which the need for a new passport system was just one.”

The Institute decided to review its data center technologies and standardize on a

platform that would meet its current requirements while providing the flexibility to

grow and adapt for the future.

Solution

The city’s legacy server estate, bought in 2008 and nearing end-of-life status,

was compared with the FlexPod architecture from Cisco and NetApp. “The existing

platforms were going to be costly to replace,” says Carlebur. “You got more capacity

than you needed, which meant you paid more than you wanted. So we had to look

for a more viable option.” Moreover, the need for additional blade servers from the

existing vendor meant the data center network would have had to be expanded.
Providing a pre-designed and pre-validated base data center configuration, FlexPod

is built on Cisco Unified Computing System™ (UCS®), Cisco Nexus® data center

switches, NetApp FAS storage components, and a range of software options.
Following a presentation organized by NetApp, FlexPod was evaluated. The fact that

additional servers could simply be plugged into the existing data center network

fabric was a considerable plus point and a much more efficient solution. “When

you move to a new platform you have to learn how to use it, which costs money,”

says Carlebur. “Even taking that into account, we still decided it would be cheaper

to switch to FlexPod.”

Customer Case Study

Rotterdam insures that its data centers reliably and cost effectively deliver city services for the

foreseeable future with FlexPod

Customer Name:

Government of

Rotterdam

Industry:

Public sector

Location:

Netherlands

Number of Employees:

12,000

Challenge

• Assure future delivery of local

government and port-based services

• Reduce costs and improve efficiency

Solution

• FlexPod architecture, integrating Cisco

Nexus data center switches and Cisco
Unified Computing System servers
with NetApp storage, for an easy-to-
manage environment with plug-and-play
computing

Results

• Improved ability to support a

mushrooming population of diverse
applications

• Overall IT spend lowered by €165,000

in 2012; maintenance costs reduced by
€105,000 over next three years

• Server provisioning cut from days to

hours; restarting servers simultaneously
is saving four man-hours per week

Page 1 of 3